The Xiaomi Mi-2 Teardown

Editor: Staff Editor

I know what you're thinking, “the what now?”. The Xiaomi Mi-2 is a new phone for the Chinese market and the first run sold out in under 3 minutes.

The company is a relative newcomer, but one that is intent on dominating its piece of the world with a combination of value pricing, great specifications, and just enough hot bits to catch the eye of a consumer.
Whats the difference from this phone and phones twice its price?
From the exterior shots the one can’t help but draw the obvious comparisons with a certain market-leading phone. At the same time the Chipworks guys admit that you can’t do all that much different with a large touch screen, but the rounded edges, the size and shape of the bezel, the sides, and the microphone port all feel a little familiar.
Xiaomi has gone a flashy route in a battery that is a little hard to spot at first glance. Look hard to find the orange rectangular thing at the right. This battery provides 7.4Wh so no loss there versus most other phones.
The touch screen control is an Atmel MXT336S – designed for screens up to 5.5″ with 336 nodes.
And the rest?
One of the first things to notice is that the board design is not the most modern, which results in kind of a bulky phone, 10.2 mm thick. And Qualcomm seems to be a major winner by providing the chipset solution:
Qualcomm MDM 8215 Baseband processor with PM8821 & PM8018 power management
Qualcomm WCN3660 WiFi SoC
Qualcomm WCD9310 Audio CODEC
Qualcomm WTR1605 HSPA+/CDMA2K/TDSCDMA/EDGE/GPSChip
Audience eS310B Audio Processor
Toshiba THGBM5G8A4J 32 GB NAND Flash
STMicroelectronics L3G4200D Gyroscope
Bosch C3H Accelerometer
Knowles S932 MEMS Microphone
AKM AK8963 Hall Effect Sensor (compass)
Texas Instruments TPA2015D1 Audio Amplifier
All of these suppliers are what one can usually find in most of the flagship phones on the market today.
You can find the entire teardown here